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June 18, 2011

mtDNA Test Results Arrived!

Written by Lorine McGinnis Schulze of http://olivetreegenealogy.blogspot.com (see FN1)

Readers may recall that on May 10 this year I mailed in my mtDNA Test Kit which I ordered from Family Tree DNA . Well, last week an email arrived saying my test results were posted!

I was pretty excited and immediately went to the Family Tree DNA website to read the results. I have to confess that I'm confused. I'm not sure what I've learned that will help me in discovering my maternal origins.

It seems my Haplogroup is J and I have 5 mutations from Cambridge Reference Sequence (CRS). But what does it all mean? I've got a lot of reading to do! One thing I spotted during a quick browse of various articles was reference to Haplogroup J being found more frequently in centenarians than in younger individuals. (Source: http://www.fasebj.org/content/13/12/1532.full) The women on my mom's side all live to be in their 90s so that's kind of interesting.

An intriguing but still puzzling result is my Recent Ancestral Origins section. Here FamilyTreeDNA displays a chart showing the countries of origin reported by the people I match. This intrigued me because my maternal lineage as far back as I know it (Mary Ansell born Kent 1771), is based solidly in England.

But my chart results show I match 80 people from England, 54 from Germany, 22 from Ireland, 13 from France, 11 from Sweden and several other countries where my matches are under 10. I'm going to have to do some reading to understand what these numbers mean because there are also percentages given showing what % of the total population tested within each country of origin match my test results.

England is low - yes it says I match 80 people who gave England as the country of origin of their most distant female ancestor. But it then shows that I only match 1.2% of the population tested. That seems low to me, especially since I also match at 1.2% the total who gave Austria, 1.2 % who said Denmark and 1% who gave Switzerland as their most distant country of origin. More research on my part is definitely required for me to understand these numbers.

I also gave in to temptation and upgraded from mtHVR1 to Mega. The sale price at Family Tree DNA was too good for me to resist!

An extra step you can take with your DNA test results is to submit them to mitosearch then you check for matches in their database. I did that and sent off emails to the people who most closely matched my 5 mutations. We'll see what develops from that!

It also seems to me that I need to join some DNA projects so I'm off to hunt for any that I think apply.

FN1: I've added my name and blog URL to the header of this post because two other blogs are copying my DNA articles without permission and posting them on their blogs. No link back to my blog is given and my name is omitted as the author. Since I hope to make connections with other genealogists through my blog, I have added my name and blog URL. This may help ensure that some notation is kept that indicates to readers of these unscrupulous blogs that the articles are not written by the blog owners in question. These same blog owners have disabled their comment feature and removed email addresses so I cannot contact them.

7 comments:

With an mtDNA test it's always a good idea to join the relevant haplogroup project. There is a haplogroup J project here:

http://www.familytreedna.com/public/J-mtDNA

Your readers might like to know that there is a full list of mtDNA haplogroup projects in the ISOGG Wiki:

http://www.isogg.org/wiki/MtDNA_haplogroup_projects

The basic HVR1 mtDNA test is a very low resolution test, rather like the 12-marker Y-DNA test, and many people do have lots of matches. These are mostly very distant and you probably share a common ancestor several thousand years ago. The full sequence test (also known as the mega) will give you a much better idea of your geographical origins, and if you have any exact matches they are more likely to be of genealogical relevance.

Very interesting! I'm still debating whether mtDNA testing would be worthwhile, so I look forward to hearing more about what you learn!

So sorry to hear about those other blogs copying your posts- talk about not cool. On the other hand, it speaks to the quality of your writing. Still, I wish there was a way to make people like that stop.

New!

Death Finds a Way: A Janie Riley Mystery by Lorine McGinnis SchulzeJanie Riley is an avid genealogist with a habit of stumbling on to dead bodies. She and her husband head to Salt Lake City Utah to research Janie's elusive 4th great-grandmother. But her search into the past leads her to a dark secret. Can she solve the mysteries of the past and the present before disaster strikes?

I'm an incurable collector of
antiques, an avid genealogist and a messy but creative cook! I blog, i write history and genealogy books. My main genealogy website is Olive Tree Genealogy http://olivetreegenealogy.com/

Lorine is the author of many published genealogical and historical
articles and books available at
http://LorineSchulze.com